I've been pressure canning for a year and a half, time enough to be confident that when I'm careful, my food is safe and stores well. But last night was the first time i did raw pack and now i understand why everyone comes here to post photos and ask "is this safe?" Chicken breasts were on sale, so I thought I'd give raw pack a try, filling clean but cold jars with the raw chicken, everything cold/room temp, easy prep, right? Well, it's weird. I've done a lot of hot packing and it's easy to tell when your jars are filled properly because they're FILLED. There's water or stock in all the crannies, you de-bubble, measure the headspace and it's solid. Raw pack instructions say "place meat loosely in the jar and ensure 1 1/4" headspace, but what about all that air in the jar between the pieces of meat? And which hump on the surface do you use for measuring headspace? Is there going to be more problem from underfilling or overfilling? There's so much uncertainty But I took a deep breath, placed the jars in the pot and got it started. First, omg, did it take forever to get hot! Usually the heating time is a concurrent activity to filling jars. I did not plan to still be up at midnight waiting for my canner to depressurize. Once I could safely open the canner, I was really surprised with how much juice there is in the jars, but so much headspace. Also, that meat, that I carefully cut into bite-sized cubes, is cooked into one big clump in the middle of each jar.
Three questions: (1) reassure me that the huge headspace is safe and normal. (2) is it safe that the meat is a solid chunk? Did it get adequate heat penetration? (3) When you pressure can stew beef, has it cooked long enough for the connective tissue to break down and be soft? I'd usually simmer a stew for 4 to 6 hours.
Photos: pint jars of raw-packed chicken breast processed at 12lb pressure for 75 minutes
by DiscombobulatedAsk47
4 Comments
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Headspace is fine, and the meat that looks like a solid clump, easily comes apart when you dump it out and pick at it with a fork. We raw can chicken meat all the time, ours looks like yours. Some canners call this “Ugly Chicken”
I don’t do much meat except for tuna every other year or sooner and minimum 150#s at a time.
I raw pack. To get the air out, I will slide an exceptionally sharp knife down through the meat. Be careful because you don’t want to tap bottom and you don’t want to compress the meat for a tight pack because this can break jars. But, I have had large air pockets trappand jar breakage – so it’s a delicate balance.
When entering my tuna and other raw packed meats, I often get disqualified in competitions because “liquid doesn’t cover product.” That’s just a reality of a raw pack and having liquid cover product doesn’t always happen (rarely does it.)
So, it may not be the prettiest looking thing in a jar, but often is one of the tastiest.
For future reference, Ball has a tested method for raw pack with hot liquid added, which corrects this problem. Remember to adjust the PSI needed based on your altitude.
[https://imgur.com/8EPTziD](https://imgur.com/8EPTziD)